4 Ideas UX Designers can Learn from Game Development

As game developer’s audience are more demanding, game developer are often more careful in designing for their audience. Hearing lots of criticism from audience is part of their projects. This makes game developers should be a bit more transparent. As web designers, we can learn a lot from them. How they handle everything with detail in their process, their intentions, and their vision. Here are 4 points that you can learn from.

Be Open about Your Intentions

One of the good examples is Overwatch’s developers. They have established clear goals in mind for everything they do. They publically state what they want to accomplish, and they go for it. Moreover, their actions consistently show determination to meet all of their stated goals. From this story we can learn lots of lesson. For example: you should explain to your users what you’re aiming for when you make a change or new feature. Instead of saying what you want, you better give details of what you want achieving. So, users will believe it when they see it.

Correct Your Mistakes

In many games, bugs still exist. For example is DDO which has a bug with its ladders. Sometimes, you can’t climb up them past a certain point. Then, you can’t even grab onto them for a few seconds. This is partially due to lag, which affects all online games. But, sometimes, even when every other system is working fine, with no lag, the ladders just don’t. Even though, their developer have stated that the bug has been fixed. But until now, it’s not on the list of known issues.

You may or will experience this kind of things and you better believe them. Even if you have trouble reproducing the issue, you have to keep looking. Your users’ trust in you depends on it.

Document Everything

Back to the DDO story, there are some reasons why they can’t find and fix the bugs in DDO. One of the reasons is because the game has been over a decade old. Therefore, many of the original developers are long gone. Even though, there are so many systems that are only half-finished in the first place. It’s a miracle when they can find bugs to fix them.

The only way to avoid the same problem is to start documenting. It’s not just about commenting your code; it’s about documenting your decisions. In fact, every decision you make about your project, every new feature you start work on, should be in an easy-to-find file. Your reasons for making the change, or reverting it, altering it, or not finishing the feature, this should all be in there. Besides, you should know where to find all of the relevant code for each new feature or change.

Creating lack of documentation sometimes will lead you to unfixable bugs.

Play Your Own game

Every game developer would play their own game. They may not all pros. But, they will experience the game as it appears to low-level and high-level players. This means they can easily understand their user base.

If you release a game without even playing it at all, you will easily get mocked in the community. People will give high respect to any game developer who truly understands every little thing in the game. This principle is known as “eating your own dog food”. This act will convince your audience that you are confident with your product.